Monkey's Audio

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Monkey's Audio

Developer:	Matthew T. Ashland
Latest release:	4.01b2 / February 17, 2006
OS:	Cross-platform
Use:	Audio compression Encoder
License:	Monkey's Audio Source Code License Agreement
Website:	www.monkeysaudio.com

Monkey’s Audio is a proprietary lossless audio data compression codec. Unlike lossy formats, such as MP3, Advanced Audio Coding and Ogg Vorbis, lossless codecs exactly reconstruct the source waveform. A file compressed with Monkey's Audio sounds the same as the original file, no matter how many times it is uncompressed and reencoded. Monkey's Audio can be used for distribution, playback and archival purposes. Monkey's Audio files use the filename extension .ape for audio and .apl for track metadata info.

1 Comparisons
2 Supported platforms
3 See also
4 References
5 External links

When comparing Monkey's Audio against other audio formats, it should be noted that Monkey's Audio is a lossless format, i.e. one that preserves the exact source data. Against other lossless compression formats such as FLAC and Shorten, Monkey's Audio compares well in some departments and worse in others.

While lossless audio compression heavily relies on the file being compressed, Monkey's Audio generally achieves compression rates which are slightly better than FLAC and significantly better than the older Shorten. Given this, both encoding and decoding are generally slightly slower than both FLAC and Shorten, and due to design decisions, the decoder is problematic to implement on portable digital audio players. It suffers from relatively slow seeking, depending on the compression level chosen.^{[citation needed]}

Monkey's Audio was criticized because it was not free software or open source. This means that some distributions of GNU/Linux and other operating systems that rely on only free software could not include it and the software ecosystem around Monkey's Audio is less varied than that of other, more freely licensed lossless compressors such as FLAC. Since FLAC comes pre-installed with most distributions of GNU/Linux, FLAC is typically preferred by users running that operating system. The older Shorten format has been used for many years in the live taping community. Sites such as etree typically still use Shorten, though some are beginning to move to FLAC. Now that Monkey's Audio is both free and has "freely available source code, simple SDK and non-restrictive licensing - other developers can easily use Monkey's Audio in their own programs -- and there are no "evil" restrictive licensing agreements"

Since Monkey's Audio is a lossless compression method, it is not readily comparable with lossy compression methods such as MP3, Ogg Vorbis and AAC. The two different types of formats have different aims. The aim of Monkey's Audio is to preserve an exact reproduction of the original file in as small a space as possible. The aim of lossy codecs is to discard sound data in an intelligent manner so that it fits the amount of space (or bit rate) specified by the user while retaining as much quality as possible.

Since Monkey's Audio preserves the entire quality of the original file, files tend to be significantly larger than lossy compression formats such as MP3. A typical Monkey's Audio file will use around 600 to 700 kilobits per second (kb/s) for CD quality audio. MP3 allows the user to select a bitrate but typical bitrates chosen are 128 to 192 kilobits per second which allow good, but not perfectly identical, quality.

Officially, Monkey's Audio is only available for the Windows operating system. There was some discussion on the Monkey's Audio website about official support for GNU/Linux and Mac OS users, though none of this came to fruition. A developer by the name of SuperMMX released an unofficial port in early 2005, which also includes plugins to allow playback using the popular audio players XMMS and Beep Media Player. This port was originally developed for GNU/Linux but, since version 3.99 update 4 build 4, it has included support for Mac OS X as well as GNU/Linux on the PowerPC and SPARC architectures.

However, the future of this unofficial port is quite uncertain since the project has not received official approval from Monkey's Audio's author, something which may be required by the legally ambiguous license under which it is released.^[1] Additionally, many GNU/Linux distributions will not include the Monkey's Audio software since its licence is neither free software nor open source. The Win32 binary from Monkey's Audio is reported to work successfully on GNU/Linux when executed in the Wine Windows compatibility environment.